Win7, Bing in spotlight ahead of Microsoft results

In today's podcast: Win7, Bing in spotlight ahead of Microsoft results; China restores some Net access to Xinjiang; Intel cuts prices on some quad-core chips.

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Windows 7 and Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, will be under close watch when the company reports its financial earnings this week. Ahead of the results announcement Thursday, financial analysts have highlighted Windows 7 and Bing as reasons to be cautiously optimistic about business growth at Microsoft despite the continuing uncertain economic climate. Microsoft's Windows business, which still provides the bulk of its revenue, has been taking a hit from netbooks, which have cut into traditional PC sales. However, Gartner's outlook for the PC market, released last week, was better than expected and therefore bodes well for Windows 7's release in October.

China has started restoring some Internet access to a province where it was blocked after deadly ethnic riots two weeks ago, but the outage has already taken a toll on local businesses. China blocked all Internet access in western Xinjiang province to prevent the spread of rioting that killed at least 197 and injured 1,600. Chinese state media has accused Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority, of using instant messaging programs and Web sites like Facebook to plan the violence, which started with attacks against the majority Han Chinese ethnic group. But the Internet lockdown has also slowed or crippled business for local companies with mainly online operations.

Intel dropped prices of some quad-core desktop processors on Sunday as it gets ready to launch new quad-core chips code-named Lynnfield later this year, perhaps as early as September. Lynnfield chips are based on Intel's latest Nehalem microarchitecture, which cuts down on performance bottlenecks that plague its current chips. Nehalem chips are also able to execute more tasks while drawing less power. An Intel official last week said that Lynnfield chips were on track for production in the second half of 2009, but didn't provide an exact shipment date. The company released Core i7 chips based on Nehalem for high-end desktops late last year, but those chips go into workstations and specialist systems built for enthusiasts like gamers.

EMC has officially acquired majority ownership of storage vendor Data Domain after a bidding war with NetApp. After an initial stock purchase offering period ended Friday, EMC acquired 78.2 percent of the outstanding Data Domain shares, in addition to the 3.9 percent of shares previously held by EMC. A second offering period ending Wednesday will allow Data Domain shareholders to sell their stock at US$33.50 a share, the original price offered by EMC. As of mid-day Monday, Data Domain shares were trading at $33.51 on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

... And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I’m Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.